So, you’re ready to build your brand?

Successful businesses need strong brands. This is the case from the smallest company to the largest multi-national. Year after year, Pepsi wins on blind taste-testing but Coca Cola is the world’s favourite cola. Why? The answer is simple. They have the strongest brand.

Making a strong brand takes work but the initial steps are just as important at every level of business. And you don’t need Coke’s marketing budget to do it.

Writing a brief

To make your brand project easier, we’ve created a helpful checklist that will help you define what you want and what you need. Hopefully developing a better understanding of what you want to get out of the project.

Let's get started

We'll need a few details first.

Step 1: The basics

Let’s work out what you need to get out of this project.

Brand guidelines

At the end of a brand project, a set of guidelines help you keep your visual brand consistent. It also makes it easier and cheaper to create content and marketing in the future.

Marketing materials

Let’s work out what you need to get out of this project as 'Marketing Materials' can mean a wide range of items. It can include websites and designs for simple documentation and stationery, all the way to brochures, ad campaigns and social media content.

Step 2: Do you have a brand strategy?

Having a think about your strategy can help you learn more about yourself and your brand. It’s not essential for this stage but it can really help if you are up to the challenge. If these questions are all a bit much at this stage, feel free to keep this on the back burner until later.

Why?

Why do we have this brand, service or product? The cool reason that this ‘thing’ exists.

How?

How are we going to deliver the ‘Why’? How do we take this thing to market and get it in front of customers.

What?

What actually is it? A service, software, a product? What are we selling?

Who?

Who is the target market? Who are we selling to?

Congratulations!

By completing the above form, you’ve not only made it easier to brief the project to an agency or designer, you’ve also developed a stronger idea of your new brand, what you need and what you want to get out of the project.